Tim Kaine should be held accountable for this... and we don't need any more of Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance http://www.nvta.org/content.asp?contentid=1189 trying to stick us with new sales taxes to pay for road projects. This is a serious breach of public fiduciary responsibility.

http://www.wtop.com/?nid=30&sid=2060345

I hope the feds haven't pulled the money back. Of course it will probably be redeployed to rural Virginia anyway.

Kaine cut 1/3 of VDOT's staff and turned a project deficit into a cash balance. Closing the rest areas was overkill but since when is having a rainy day fund and cutting government staff a bad thing in conservative thinking?

All I can say is they better fix some roads and bridges

The money was committed just not spent. It was just caught up in bureaucracy, but it was committed to projects that haven’t started yet or finished. BIG DIFFERENCE.

Knowwhatyouaretalkingabout Wrote:
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> The money was committed just not spent. It was
> just caught up in bureaucracy, but it was
> committed to projects that haven’t started yet
> or finished. BIG DIFFERENCE.


Quote from the article, feel free to post a counter to it if you have info that says this is wrong: "... allowed millions of dollars in cash to languish, sometimes for years, after projects it was intended to fund became inactive."

If you have a project that stops, the funding should be deobligated.

It's non-news. The projects hadn't started yet since they were held up for non-financial factors. You don't hear the new gov talking about rescinding the higher fees for registration and tags or the plans to slap tolls all over Virginia.

Was this money usable during the February snowstorm?

From our experience with the fellow who eventually came up/down our hilly street--7 days after the snow ended--more training in driving the snow plows and what to do/what not to do when moving the snow is very important. The fellow who drove the plow we saw may have been drunk/hung over. But he certainly was not thinking about how to move the snow so people could drive out of their driveways on this hill.

Knowwhatyouaretalkingabout Wrote:
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> The money was committed just not spent. It was
> just caught up in bureaucracy, but it was
> committed to projects that haven’t started yet
> or finished. BIG DIFFERENCE.


No,then you would lose the money, everyone knows that....

They're operating under a six-year plan for maintenance and new construction. They don't lose the money.

Oh Les,

Let me tell you how Govt works. One program has a certain part of its program cancelled. If they deobligate the money it goes back to some central fund (maybe still in VDOT). The smart program director will hold onto the money until he needs it for another project, since he still has control over it.

formerhick76 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Kaine cut 1/3 of VDOT's staff and turned a project
> deficit into a cash balance. Closing the rest
> areas was overkill but since when is having a
> rainy day fund and cutting government staff a bad
> thing in conservative thinking?


The problem is the same one with the county bonds that we vote on every November, in that they want to continuously increase our taxes, and rape our income in order to maintain and/or improve certain aspects of where we live, yet they have hundreds of millions of dollars that sit around never being spent on what they're meant to be spent upon. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't using the neglected stash funds as under-the-table sweeteners for developers.

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"And if any women or children get their legs torn off, or faces caved in, well, it's tough shit for them." -2LT. Bert Stiles, 505th, 339th (On Berlin Bombardier Mission, 1944).

Isn't the 1st rule of budget management to always spend the whole thing so you can ask for more money in the future?

804 Wrote:
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> Isn't the 1st rule of budget management to always
> spend the whole thing so you can ask for more
> money in the future?


Or rather, to not ask for more money until you actually need it.

==================================================================================================
"And if any women or children get their legs torn off, or faces caved in, well, it's tough shit for them." -2LT. Bert Stiles, 505th, 339th (On Berlin Bombardier Mission, 1944).